How to Prevent Burnout: and reignite your life and career

By Susan Scott

Dealing with ongoing demands, pressure and worries can leave you struggling to cope and fearing that one day you simply won’t be able to go on. It can happen to the best of us. “How to Prevent Burnout” gives you the know-how to stop stress in its tracks and prevent you from burning out. It will provide you with the knowledge an

• Language: English
• Publisher: Filament Publishing
• Release date: Oct 17, 2017
• ISBN: 9781912256457

Susan Scott

Susan Scott is a New York Times bestselling author and leadership development architect who has enabled top executives worldwide to engage in vibrant dialogue with one another, with their employees, and with their customers for two decades. She pioneered the process of fierce conversations that has touched the lives of millions of people and now she's freshly applying these ideas to our romantic relationships. Susan lives in Medina, Washington.

Book preview

1: Introduction

• Are you struggling to cope with the demands and pressures of your working life?

• Are you exhausted but feel you just have to keep going to be successful?

• Do you find it hard to sleep as well as you used to?

• Do you rely on caffeine and sweet foods to give you the energy to keep going?

• Are you worried that work may be having a detrimental effect on your health and wellbeing?

• Do you feel your life is out of control?

• Do you sometimes wonder how you can achieve what you want to achieve without crashing and burning in the process?

Yes? Well – you’re not alone.

As a Young Professional, you are likely to be focused, highly aspirational and driven to succeed in your career – a career that identifies and defines who you are. But twenty-first century living is tough and getting tougher. I know from the research I have done that Young Professionals are struggling to cope. This age group is at higher risk of burning out than any other working age group.

Young Professionals are career-minded people in the early stages of their working lives, typically between the ages of 21 and 32. They are building a reputation based on their knowledge, skills, impact and influence, wanting to be the best that they can be, and achieve their aspirations. But the demands of a 24/7 society and a full-on job, not to mention other responsibilities and commitments, make it physically and mentally difficult.

Young Professionals can push so hard that it takes them beyond their capacity to bounce back and recover. This puts any sense of desired achievement and reward in jeopardy.

Could this be you?

The good news is that it is perfectly possible to keep yourself physically and mentally strong enough to live the way you want to and achieve your goals without burning out. To do this, you need strategies to keep you mentally and physically well, strategies that build your capacity to cope, and strategies to create the framework for you to live a fulfilling and satisfying life.

Why you need this book

If you want to…

– feel you have the capacity to achieve what you want from life without damaging your health

– enjoy life without feeling exhausted

– live a life that reflects who you really are

– feel able to focus, concentrate and deliver to the high standard you know you are capable of

– sleep well and feel energised and motivated

...then this book is for you.

Only you can put things right. If you’re going to achieve career success and avoid burning out in the process, now is the time to take action. You cannot afford not to.

By understanding how a highly pressured life affects you physically and mentally, you will realise just how important it is to manage the pressures you face and to build your resilience.

Eat, drink and think success

This book sets out the techniques I have used time and time again in my clinic for executive burnout. These methods are built on academic study, ongoing research and practical application… and even on some personal experiences.

As a business psychologist and nutritional therapist, I will guide you to eat, drink and think in a way that enhances your capacity to cope and gives you the strength to succeed. It’s a mind and body approach – because if you are truly going to succeed, you need to address the needs of both.

This plan is designed to empower you to reverse the effects that unrelenting pressure is having on your mind and body, and return you to a state where you feel your best and get the results you strive for.

Adrenals and attitudes

My twin track mind and body approach works with your ‘adrenals and attitudes’. It’s about looking after your adrenal glands – two tiny but mighty glands that drive the ‘fight or flight’ response – and enhancing your state of mind to cope with whatever is thrown at you. The result is that you will flourish rather than self-sabotage and wither.

I’ll be giving you the knowledge to help you create a new way of life that has the capacity to reward you with the success you so dearly want. It’s about moving you from just surviving to thriving, where you take back control and have all the ingredients required to grow and flourish.

This book will show you:

– what burnout actually is

– what your personal stress triggers are

– what stress does to your mind and body and why it leaves you feeling so ghastly

– why you exhibit certain signs and symptoms when the pressure builds up

– how to enhance the health of your adrenal glands by altering your diet and making certain critically important changes to your lifestyle

You’ll also learn about the power of the mind and how you could be the cause of your own downfall. Shifting your mindset from self-sabotaging beliefs that drain your energy and enthusiasm to positive thinking is imperative.

Finally, I want to empower you to take control back and optimise your wellbeing. This means you need to know exactly what to do to remain physically and mentally healthy despite everything that’s thrown at you.

Don’t allow life to derail you – you deserve better. To make these powerful changes, you just need know-how.

This book is packed with explanations, case studies, questionnaires and activities to complete that put you on your own journey of discovery. There’s an abundance of tips along the way to provide you with choices on what you could do to prevent yourself burning out. Picking the ones that will work best for you will have a profound effect.

Having your cake and eating it is just a matter of having the right ingredients and a good recipe – and they’re all here in this book for you to take and run with. Wake up, read the writing on the wall and put in the effort to make the changes. No one can do it for you. Do this and you will fly…

How to use the book

If you really want to benefit from your purchase, you will need to immerse yourself. Read the book from cover to cover, working your way through it step by step, taking each part in order. That is the best way to understand what the topic is all about (and there is a lot to understand).

As a result of this powerful knowledge, you can build your ultimate action plan to keep you mentally and physically healthy.

Take your time, open up your mind and work in a space that allows you to concentrate and think deeply. Each section of the book has a series of exercises to allow you to reflect on yourself and the stress you are experiencing. You are likely to find some exercises easier than others. If you are struggling with one at any time, do what you can do then leave the book and do something completely different. During that time, your subconscious mind will be whirring away so when you come back you are likely to see things with a clearer perspective.

As each section of the book closes, you will be given the opportunity to reflect on it and write down the things you found interesting, the things that made you stop and think and the things that inspired ideas for action.

This book has it all, but it is down to you how you use it. The more you put in, the more you will get out. Try not to approach this book as a one-off activity, but a work-life journey. This book has the power to guide you through your whole career until the day you retire. The more you use it, the more successful you can be.

This book is a companion to ‘How to have an outstanding career and become the person you’ve always dreamed of being’ which deals with the steps you need to take to achieve your career goals.

I wish you every success. You only have one life – embrace it and live the dream.

Part 1

Burnout

2: What is burnout?

– Do you feel exhausted most of the time?

– Are you losing your passion for work and life?

– Are you finding yourself overwhelmed by even the simplest of tasks?

– Do you struggle to pull yourself together when you wake in the morning?

– Do you often feel tearful and unable to cope?

If the answer to any of these is Yes then it’s time to take stock and change, because you may be approaching burnout.

Burnout is a state of emotional, physical and mental exhaustion which leaves you feeling at rock bottom, alone and unable to cope.

Burnout is utterly miserable. It’s much more than just feeling tired all the time.

In a state of burnout, you feel hopeless, empty and isolated to the extent that you can lose all interest in life – you just don’t have the energy for it.

Your performance is seriously impeded because you struggle to function. This isn’t something corrected by having a few nights of good sleep; by the time you feel like this, burnout has become a permanent mental and physical state with major consequences for your health and vitality.

Why does it happen? Because we allow ourselves to get stuck in ‘always doing’ mode without taking time to recover and rebalance. We’re stressed, struggling to deal with the ever-growing demands of both our work and our personal lives. We are always on the go.

Digital technology means we’re now accessible 24/7, so the boundaries between work and personal lives become blurred. At the same time, we want it all – a great job, lovely home, fit body, fulfilling hobbies, happy family – and so we drive ourselves constantly to achieve ever more. I call it ‘twenty-first century living’.

Although you may feel that your only choice is to go with it, if you don’t take better care of yourself, all this pressure increases your susceptibility to burnout.

Burnout can happen to the best

Burnout doesn’t happen overnight. It can take months or even years until eventually, one day, the mind and body says, enough is enough – you’ve worn yourself out. If you’ve let things get this far, then it can take anything from three months to two years to get you up and functioning well again.

The most vulnerable people are those who are also the most highly motivated and dedicated: people who strive to complete everything to the highest standard, those for whom work is their life and for whom it provides the very meaning of their existence.

But you can do something about it. You can prevent it happening in the first place, even if you’re reading this and feel you’re sliding uncontrollably towards burnout. With a few changes to your diet, lifestyle and thinking patterns you can not only prevent it, but find yourself feeling energised, focused and performing well once more.

Use this book to work out where you may be at risk of burnout and how, instead, you can create sustainability, living a life full of energy and motivation. Use the activities in this book to create a vision for how you will harness your aspirations for your work and personal life in combination with a healthy balanced perspective on it all.

Activity: Where are you on the road to burnout?

Could you be burning out? How do you feel right now?

Mark yourself on the scale below from 1 to 10 where 1 is ‘I’m great, no problems at all’ and 10 is ‘I feel horrendous. I’m burnt out’.

Activity: What’s increasing your risk of burnout?

Now let’s see if the evidence matches your answer to the question above. Burnout is the result of failing